Medal madness a global curse

The London Olympic medals are displayed at the Olympic Park, Wednesday, July 25, 2012, in London. Opening ceremonies for the 2012 London Olympics will be held Friday, July 27.Photo by
(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

LONDON — My favourite take on the Olympics so far comes from New Zealand. With the Games now past the halfway point, there has been a lot of crowing from the Kiwis because with three gold medals they are 14th in the official medal table, nine places ahead of Australia, their arch rivals from across the Tasman Sea.

Armchair coaches in Oz are already agonizing over why their country has just one gold medal at the XXX Olympiad. Folks Down Under may have got a distorted sense of their own standing in the Olympic world during the Sydney Games in 2000, when their country won 58 medals, including 16 gold; in Beijing four years ago, they added 46 medals, 14 of them gold.

New Zealand currently sits two spots below where Canadian officials reckoned Canada should finish at these Games: 12th.

The catch is that Canadians and Americans have long used different arithmetic than the other 202 countries to figure out where they rate at the Olympics. While others rank countries by gold medals won, in North America every medal counts, giving bronze and silver medals the same value as gold.

According to official tabulations, Canada — with eight times New Zealand’s population — currently lags nine places behind its Antipodean cousins in 23rd, rather than three spots ahead of the Kiwis in 11th, as Canadian sports officials would have their compatriots believe.

By the same self-serving, perverse logic, Canada — with its one gold medal — would rank itself ahead of Kazakhstan — which has won six — because its gold is backed by three silver and six bronze, while the Kazakhs have nothing else.

The Canadian arithmetic works great for Canada because along with Russia, Japan and Australia, it has a higher percentage of bronze and silver medals than gold.

Canada’s habit of not being able to convert second- and third-place finishes into firsts in the clutch has repeated itself at almost all of the eight Olympic Games I have worked at since the Montreal Games 36 years ago.

As for the Yanks, it doesn’t really matter how they count their medals. They have traditionally finished first using any statistical formulation. By following “the Canadian counting system,” however, the U.S. did get to claim some kind of superiority over China in Beijing, where the hosts won more gold medals but fewer medals overall.

But China is showing great staying power in London, challenging the Americans on both gold and total medal fronts, after winning the gold medal count 51-36 in Beijing.

According to an artificial alternative system of measuring sporting performance — developed by the Royal Statistical Society, with the help of a London university and the Guardian newspaper — Canada ranks 32nd at the London Games when medals are adjusted for gross domestic product. The U.S. fares only slightly better, ranked 26th based on population and 42nd for GDP. The corresponding numbers are almost reversed: 42nd adjusted for population and 29th for GDP.

While Canada and Australia are not faring particularly well in London, it is really only an issue in Australia, where being No. 1 in sport is a national mania and the saying popularized by Vince Lombardi — “winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing” — is apt. An Internet sweep finds heaps of articles describing Australia’s “poor start,” “the blame game for Australia’s poor performance” and “making excuses for the sluggish start.”

On the other hand, except when it comes to hockey at the Winter Games, Canadians — who have won the same number of gold medals, but 10 fewer overall, than Australia — generally appear to be happy to accept the bromides offered by the Canadian Olympic Committee and the government about how great it is to finish second or third or to compete in finals.

The way Canada counts its medals fits with the world’s notion that the Great White North is a lovely, laid-back country, content to make a good but not a great showing. It is a system that celebrates those who do not come through in the clutch and makes nonsense of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that Canada is ready to compete across many platforms as a serious global player.

Most of all, it is unfair to Canada’s best athletes, who will always tell you that they compete to win and that second or third never equals first.

But there are benefits to both counting systems. Rather than being only in the thrall of winners, the International Olympic Committee could adopt a system that weights medals, so while gold is valued more than other medals, silver and bronze also count for something.

Still, some perspective is required.

There are quite a few things to celebrate about Canada’s performance here. The feisty women’s basketball team is doing better than expected. Canadians in judo and women’s weightlifting have reached the podium. And a gold was won on the trampoline.

With seven days to go, a number of Canada’s strongest events are yet to come. Among those likely to make headlines, based on their consistently high world rankings, are mountain biker Catharine Pendrel, kayaker Adam van Koeverden and as many as four female wrestlers.

Canada and Australia certainly aren’t the only countries having trouble converting fine performances into medals. Russia and Germany are in the same predicament.

Meanwhile, Britain, enjoying the host-country bump that China got four years ago, has won 37 medals, including 16 gold, and is hysterical to be ranked third here so far — no matter how you do the math.

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